Hospital lapses delayed tuberculosis case alert
Health authorities in Britain and Hong Kong are urgently seeking people - including schoolchildren - who may have come into contact with a Tai Po teacher with tuberculosis who died days after flying home to England.
More than 300 are thought to be at risk.
Clare Lennon, who also had another serious illness, died on April 24, but the laboratory report confirming her TB infection sat in a private- hospital doctor's in-tray for eight days, and the Department of Health was only notified of the finding two days after she died. The hospital learned of her death from friends.
A friend - one of several who visited her in hospital - only found out Lennon had TB in a phone call from her parents in England. One friend, Sarah Cotillon, Ms Cotillon was diagnosed with a latent TB infection and her two children are not yet in the clear.
They are just three of 328 people the authorities have contacted, or are in the process of tracing, to warn them to be tested for the respiratory condition. Among them are 14 passengers on a Cathay Pacific flight, 247 schoolchildren aged six to 12, and 67 teachers, school staff and visitors to her isolation ward at St Paul's Hospital, Causeway Bay.
